Comment by peteforde
2 days ago
That's actually a pretty great answer. Thanks!
I believe that you made your point, and yet I also still think it's not a binary. There's certainly room for more flowery, metaphor-driven descriptions in marketing even if it's not as bluntly spec-driven as you'd prefer. For a lot of customer demos, it's trying to strike the right balance between intimidating and approachable.
I do think that people need to chill out on the knee-jerk declarations of AI slop every time something isn't as tight and poetic as they'd like. I remember (and am still bothered by) commercials in the 90s showing eg smiling moms shaking empty McCain frozen French fry bags upside down to illustrate how they are so desirable, you literally can't have enough of them.
In other words, what you're uptight about is not slop so much as late stage capitalism.
well I do hate late-stage capitalism... but mostly I am just disappointed in people. Why can't the individuals who make these sites respect their customers? why can't people respect each other? Why doesn't everyone else even view writing sincere words as an important form of respect? Because it's not normalized, I guess... but surely I am not the only one who remembers when it was more common? So I wish for the people at corporations to feel more shame about doing work they're not proud of, and I wish for customers to be much madder about other people jerking them around, such that it's extremely bad for business to treat them disrespectfully.
(Sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't try to start my own tech company that respects people to my standards so as to make all the other ones look worse in comparison. Of course I don't know if I would succeed... but heck, maybe all it takes is caring a lot? I'm not an entrepreneurial sort of person but when I think about doing it, this is why: to try to put the asshole companies, which is most of them, out of business.)
In this specific case though I just want people to read my criticism and maybe realize that they agree---that, yeah, you know what, maybe Jeff Bridges' bespoke camera company should be better than this; writing that crap on your site should be embarrassing for them.
anyway, yeah, we've been drowning in slop our whole lives. The only thing AI did is automate the creation of it and make it easier (for now) to identify.